from the who-needs-consumers? dept

Following up on the news of how ACTA negotiators hid the information about the latest round of negotiations, including scheduling the only opportunity for consumer advocates to meet with negotiators until it was too late for those consumer advocates to get to Tokyo in time for the meeting, a bunch of those groups asked the Japanese delegation to change the schedule to allow for a meeting next week, rather than on the 24th. Sean Flynn passes along the note he received (and others got nearly identical notes):

Dear Mr.Flynn

Thank you for your contact.

First of all, we regret that we could not inform you earlier of the lunch meeting.

As we just settled our program of this round this week with other parties, we have not able to inform our schedule to public beforehand.

Please kindly understand our situation.

Actually lunch time on 24 Sept is the only slot for NGO meeting.

The purpose of the lunch meeting provides an opportunity to exchange views informally between the negotiating parties and the public, not a firm consultation.

All ACTA negotiation parties recognize the importance of transparency and we are to discuss any ways to promote transparency of ACTA negotiations.

We understand the Greens/EFA Group's interest in the transparency very well.

The Government of Japan also recognizes the importance of the transparency in ACTA negotiations and decided to arrange a lunch meeting with the public on September 24 as you know.

However, it is with regret that we cannot arrange the meeting during the week of September 27 due to purely practical organizational reasons.

We regret that we could not inform you earlier of lunch meeting as you pointed out. As we just settled the program of ACTA negotiations in Tokyo this week with the negotiating parties, we cannot inform our lunch meeting to public beforehand. Please kindly understand our situation.

ACTA negotiating parties share the intention to promote transparency and we are to discuss any ways to promote the transparency of ACTA negotiations.

Best regards

Yoshihiro Takeda

Talk about lip service to transparency while at the same time mocking it. Also, while some supporters of ACTA seem to claim that because the documents were shown once to such public interest groups everything's perfectly transparent, it seems pretty damn obvious that those working on ACTA have done their best to keep rather important stakeholders very much out of the conversation. Of course, the industries, who are such fans of ACTA, may discover that screwing over consumers and consumer advocates comes back to bite them. You don't have much of a business without consumers after all.

from the how-nice dept

While it's not clear that it's done much, at least at the last few ACTA negotiation meetings, time has been set aside for various "civil society groups" to meet with the negotiators and ask some questions. Apparently, the ACTA negotiators would rather not do that anymore. Sean Flynn has detailed just how difficult the negotiators made it for such groups to attend the latest meeting in Tokyo. Everyone knew that the meeting was happening in Tokyo, but the rumors were that it started next week. Nope. At the last minute, it came out that they actually start on Thursday of this week -- and that info wasn't released publicly until it was effectively too late for most to get a ticket to get to Japan:

You can't book a plane trip if you don't when to book it for. It takes 15- 20 hours to fly to Japan from the east coast of the U.S. and you land a day after you take off. So U.S. groups that want to attend the meeting at the start of it -- you needed to buy your ticket when the announcement hit after 3pm yesterday and be on a plane now. If you want to go to the one hour civil society meeting, you need to leave by tomorrow. Those that have bought a ticket likely have one for next week -- when everyone thought the negotiation would be. So they will miss the civil society meeting.

Figuring out that the announcement of the date of the meeting was made yesterday was no easy feat. Two individuals (myself and Malini Aisola from KEI) inquiring with USTR yesterday about the meeting were first told that they had to contact the Japanese Embassy for information on the meeting. We were given the name of Mr. Kazuyuki Takimi, First Secretary, Economic Section, Embassy of Japan, Kazuyuki.Takimi@mofa.go.jp, 202-238-6729.

Mr. Takimi said he did not know when the meeting was going to be held because he had not spoken to "Tokyo" lately. He said he recalled it might be meeting on September 23, but could not confirm. He said he had no agenda and no knowledge of any civil society meeting opportunity.

Nice of them, huh? Flynn also notes that while an agenda has been posted on the USTR website, it's almost impossible to find:

If you want to laugh -- go to that site and try to find the agenda. It is not in any of the press releases on the top or bottom of the site. It is not the prominent link on the left for the agenda to the 5th Round -- that was in 1999. It is not in the upper right hand or left hand boxes where the recent announcements are. Still looking? It starts with the 372nd word in the background essay in the middle page.

Of course, if you do find the agenda (pdf), you discover it's nothing substantial at all. It basically just says they'll be meeting pretty much every day.

Considering that almost everyone agrees the Tokyo meetings are intended to "finalize" the (still secret) agreement, it looks like ACTA maybe going out the same way it came into life: in near total secrecy, without involving rather important stakeholders representing the people ACTA will impact the most. What a disgraceful process.